Monitor recovery

Such swift, unpredictable changes in visibility take place at Hatteras constantly, making the Monitor an unusually elusive wreck.

Few people have logged more than a few descents on the 173-foot-long iron hulk without finding themselves lost on at least one unnerving occasion.

When that happens, many experienced divers have learned to look for the golden-brown stripes of the young amberjacks that school here on the bottom. More than one temporarily disoriented person has found his or her way back to the ship by following these flashing, 16-inch-long forms as they jet through the cloudy water.

Not many years ago, the sheer difficulty of finding the Monitor in the first place plagued each newly arrived expedition with a maddening problem. Though marked with a submerged buoy tethered to a heavy concrete anchor, the wreck seemed to de-materialize whenever would-be visitors called, forcing the Navy to locate the buoy by dragging a diver back and forth under the water.

Such elusiveness has diminished considerably since 1999, when the Navy and NOAA began using the satellite-guided Global Positioning System to locate the sunken vessel. Three years later, some notable advances in software have diluted the Monitor's mystery even more, enabling the crew of the Wotan to maneuver and hold the barge in place directly over any part of the wreck.

Still, the diving conditions this morning have quickly shifted from pretty good to crummy, and that's enough to make Scholley grumble as she leaves the surface-supplied communications van, walks past the giant steel spider and picks her way across the equipment-strewn staging yard. She's still frowning as she climbs the stairs up the side of the anchor-winch house to the main control tower, where she hopes to talk to Broadwater about the potential delay in the expedition's tight recovery schedule.

They have 45 days in which to recover the turret - and then they must go home.

Opening the door, Scholley finds the scientist's empty seat pushed up against another, haze-filled video monitor. His nearby laptop computer is closed. A second laptop lies open on the jumbled counter just a few feet away, its glowing screen criss-crossed by a series of vibrant, superimposed patterns.

Hovering in the middle is a large green rectangle representing the barge. Labeled with the positions of both the saturation and surface-supplied diving stations, it also shows each of the eight anchor lines that make up the floating mooring.

Beneath this spiderlike form lies the much smaller, white-colored outline of the Monitor itself. Running roughly east to west, it looks like a plump cigar - with the north or port side bulging out just a few yards beyond the diving stations on the barge.

Smaller still is the bright red circle buried under the Monitor's upside-down hull.

That's the famous gun turret that changed naval history 140 years ago.

Just before 11:30 a.m. on this bright June day it's located at 35.00.099 degrees North, 75.24.358 degrees South.

Two hundred forty feet down in a blinding cloud of silt.

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Next Sunday: Stalking an Iron GhostIn Chapter 2 of the series, Daily Press reporter Mark St. John Erickson explores why the wreck of the Monitor remained lost for so long -- and how a determined team of scientists finally cracked the elusive vessel's secret.